I am using Parity 2.7.2 on a virgin compute instance (32gb RAM, SSD, fast internet, 6 cores), and after the snapshots were downloaded and it gets to the blocks, it is about 33,000 blocks behind. I came back a few hours to compare and it is 32,300 blocks behind. This will take too long to catch up at this rate.

I am running with no flags. I plan to use this node to get and submit work to the mainnet network.

Are there flags I can use these days to get this synced much faster? I know warp/fast is a default flag now so a lot of online information is 3 years old and outdated. Maybe there is a still relevant flag for a cache or maybe data I can do without or make it leverage more RAM and CPU?

Also one peculiar thing is that it seems to download some blocks multiple times, example:

Those 5 seconds also could have been used to catch up to the top of the chain faster. I was thinking these are records of uncles or orphans, but I'm thrown off by the same block hash or maybe thats how it works. This seems to exacerbate the problem.